Renaming

In practice

The bar is higher, not lower. A new name has to beat the incumbent by enough to justify the cost of the switch, the confusion during transition, and the equity written off. That case has to be made with evidence, because the people who chose the old name are usually still in the room.

Twitter becoming X in 2023 is the most visible recent case. WARC later reported, from panel data, that X trailed Twitter on awareness, consideration and usage. We would not read that as a verdict on the decision, but it shows what a known name carries. Facebook's move to Meta in 2021 shows the alternative: the group took a new name and the Facebook network kept its own.

In a naming project a renaming starts with the written case: what the old name can no longer do, what the new one must do, and what is lost. What goes wrong is that the case is argued by taste. The people who chose the old name are still in the room, and the new one has to be judged against criteria agreed beforehand, not against whoever speaks loudest. A renaming also inherits obligations a new name does not: existing registrations, domains, customers who search for the old name. Strategy first, as in Brand strategy for established companies, and the name, and the wider scope question under rebranding.

Where this sits in the process

The studio treats this as part of a single run rather than a separate service: the category is read, the creative direction is chosen from what the research found, candidates are generated in volume and then cut against criteria that were written down first. See how the studio works for what that produces, or the naming module for the stages themselves.

Related concepts

• Rebranding: What changes in a rebrand, what a name change costs specifically, and how the two decisions differ in risk.
• Brand strategy: What a brand strategy has to settle before naming begins, and what happens to creative work when it has not.
• Eponymous name: Founder names carry authenticity and a long tail of complications.

Further reading

• Brand strategy for established companies, and the name: Why an established brand needs a strategy as much as a new one, how the name gets out of step with the business, and what to decide before keeping, extending or changing it.